.Club applicant eliminates competition and raises $7 million to launch top level domain.
.Club Domains, LLC has raised a combined $7 million from 27 individual investors and has eliminated its competition for the .club top level domain through a private auction.
The new top level domain applicant recently filed its SEC Form D to raise up to $7 million, and later announced it raised half of that amount to participate in the private auction.
Citing confidentiality agreements, .Club Domains CEO Colin Campbell declined to provide the final auction price to Domain Name Wire.
“We’ve raised $7 million to acquire the rights to the name and to launch the name,” he said.
Given the previous $3.5 million announcement and the language used in the company’s press release about the auction, I suspect the auction price was no more than $3.5 million.
Campbell said the auction lasted four days.
As of right now the company has three or four employees, but it is ready to expand. Campbell said it might take 15-20 people to execute on the vision for .club.
“You could obviously run a registry for a lot less, but we like to do things in a big way”, he said.
He also envisions multiple offices around the world. Campbell said “club” is a worldwide brand; a term used in almost all countries to mean a similar thing.
Despite an application priority number of 1,046, Campbell is optimistic that .club will launch by early 2014 because it lacks GAC advice and is no longer faces competition.
“I can’t say how happy and excited the staff here are [about winning the auction]” he said.
…..oh whiskey river, candy mountain!
My advice to any investors is to pay yourself first before you get holding a bag of dust.
I’ve owned and do own many club domains and inquiries have always been light on most.
I expect that with an auction result of $3.5 million the company likely needs to file a change request at ICANN and may trigger a re-evaluation of its application. We will see …
To deep in the hole already, no signs of any profits to be seen for a very long time, offices around the world, who will pay these premiums, good luck…
Nice looks like the owner of club.com’s is sitting pretty nice right now.
“He also envisions multiple offices around the world.”
Wonder if he also envisions first class airfares between? Looks like silly season is just starting.
Too bad .club is not a typo of .com.
I would be very surprised if new tlds quality of .club – and that’s overwhelming majority of new tlds – sell more than 5,000 domains for $10 a year, for $50K a year total revenue. Large percentage of new tlds may end up selling 500-2,000 domains total.
If you look at .club solely as a domain name, then the investment required might not make sense.
But the company plans to sell/offer services on top of the TLD to help clubs. I suspect this is where it will make a lot of its money, and a business like that could produce a return on a $7M investment if executed properly.
The bigger question for .club will be how it goes to market. Does it market directly to clubs, or does it try to get most of its customers through registrars?
If you go through registrars, do they get the .club bundle of services with their purchase? If so, registrars may hesitate to sell the domain if it means they’ll miss out on webhosting revenue or if they’ll have to provide additional information to registrants, such as a login to activate the club management services.
sounds like a bubble in the making.
and you got love their URL:
http://www.dotclub.COM
@ Domo Sapiens – what else would they use?